Sacred Poetry from Around the World

You do not have to be good.You do not have to walk on your kneesFor a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.You only have to let the soft animal of your bodylove what it loves.Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.Meanwhile the world goes on.Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rainare moving across the landscapes,over the prairies and the deep trees,the mountains and the rivers.Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,are heading home again.Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,the world offers itself to your imagination,calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --over and over announcing your placein the family of things.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.Meanwhile the world goes on.

To me this poem is a healing balm, the way it invites us to forgive our own struggles and look beyond them to a larger, living grandeur, of which we are a part.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rainare moving across the landscapes...

Winter here in Colorado...

the world offers itself to your imagination,calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting

Look up and see "the wild geese, high in the clean blue air..." Ancient purpose, animal and magnetic, lined up in chevrons across the winter sky. That eternal determination that marks our direction through the world, to be always "heading home again."

The geese continuously call out one to another, as we all do, "over and over announcing your place / in the family of things."